At six o’clock I appeared in the terminal freight yards with a bag of three-cent egg sandwiches under one arm and with my slate-colored suit-case bumping against my shins. It was not until I reached the yards and beheld the illimitable maze of tracks and the innumerable dragon-like trains of freight cars and the hive of busy, shifting engines that were making up trains, that I realized how wise I had been by coming a half hour early. I asked a switchman where I should find the freight which left for Buffalo at half-past six. Then I realized still more acutely that my difficulties were only begun, for after he had whirled the lever over and allowed the section of shunted cars to rattle past, he turned to me and with a very decided and pugilistic gesture, asked me if I would not immediately consign myself and all my ancestors to a very negative theological place. I stumbled over the switches and as I went felt the hot, resentful glare of the railroad crews, as they refused me the information I sought and spiced their refusals with peppery idioms. They would have buffeted me had I not been armed by the pass. Finally, knowing that I was in danger of losing my train, I entered the switch-house and after I had gulped a stomachful of pipe-smoke, one of the men told me that I should find the train if I would look for the numbers of the cars which were written on the pass. So I went out in the dim twilight and tried to match numbers, which to my startled, nervous imagination looked like 54679900993259 and 563780533255555555573275, but which, in reality, were an inch or two shorter! Finally I found the two numbers, and then I eagerly ran down the length of the train until I came to the caboose. I climbed up the steps, opened the dusty door and was immediately greeted by the angry gaze of the conductor and brakemen who were busy with some sort of schedules. As I humbly presented my pass to the conductor, and when it was made known to the crew that I was to be their guest in the comfortable caboose, they immediately gave me a lurid and explicit welcome: one that made me shiver. Genealogical connections of a hitherto unknown nature were ascribed to me; to them I appeared as one of the brood of imps from that negative theological place, and various exciting and blood-bringing adjectives were loaded on me that made my flesh quiver. The conductor, after generously and minutely explaining how undesirable was my presence in that caboose, going into the minutest details of my personal limitations, sent me, shuddering, over to the opposite side of the car, as far away as possible from his presence, where I found a padded window seat which was to be my bed overnight.